Visions

Happy and belated New Year.

I have attempted the arcane business of blogging, but have never seemed to be able to publish anything of sufficient merit and impact these past few weeks. For this I am profoundly unapologetic, in full awareness that at times a blog, as fields of crops, requires an extensive period of lying fallow such that mysterious biological processes may reenergize the soil (by absorbing carcase of small insects, perhaps?) What I have just mentioned is probably nonsense. Blogs cannot lie fallow, or their owners will find that whatever sagging readership they have previously mantained will disappear like autumn leaves come the winter. But when one's ideas are similarly fallow, or if the tender of the crop is otherwise engaged in activities of another nature, then it is inevitable that such things must occur. Therefore I shall acquiscese to the odes of sloth.

Now, come the New Year, I find that once again I have the compulsion to blog. I am unable to imagine why. Several times I have contemplated moving to Wordpress; subject to the apathy of the co-blogger Nova, whom I approached concerning this rather pressing issue, who replied with a random syllable or nine. Doubtless Blogger's all pervasive AI censorship will quail at the mere mention of disloyalty; well, I say to thee, Blogger, if thou wishest to mantain thy devoted slaves, thou wouldst do better to improve thy blog templates.

The question of Blogs comes once again to the forefront of introspection. Why do we blog? Why don't we? Are blogs what they seem, exegeses of expositulary intent, ego-trips, or hopeful attempts to garner notoriety? And why do some blogs lie fallow, why does compulsion, that serpentine monster of caprice, rear and strike at the strangest moments? For you must have known times where you, perhaps, sunk in capitulation to some drudgery or another, are seized with a brilliant snippet of insight that you cannot bear to keep to yourself, but when you finally sit at your computers, fingers poised to deliver your grand expositions, you falter and say, "Mayhap, I, myself, art not of the Temper for the commission of my Thought upon the flimsy paper of the Web." For, myself I must admit that such has happened oftentime, and is partially responsible for the Fallowness of this Blog.

The Fallowness shall probably be a fixture of this Blog for a long time. Perhaps, as the paradox of leisure goes, I shall be compelled to blog more, but somehow I doubt this. But you can never tell when the Blog-muse falls on your shoulders and you have no choice, as the automaton hath, but to sit at your computer and type. I yearn for the days that I could post twice a day. Those days rest, but perhaps I can live them once more, someday. For indeed they are synonymous with the nostalgia-coloured lens of hindsight, that one never fully appreciates the present, but when it is the past. Truly, is nostalgia biased, or are we? Also, was that comment a product of bias? When we perceive the present, do we see with present-tinted cynicism?

In other news I have been reading the Book of the New Sun. It is said to be dense in several ways. It leaves you with an almost indescribable feeling of awe at the sheer imaginative scope and alieness of Severian's society; and yet a feeling of frustration at the inscrutability of the narrative. But then I have not finished, thus comments are reserved for when I do, in the not-so-distant future. I wish, however, that the science fiction tones and settings were more pronounced; versimilitude of the barbarity of this future only goes so far; suspension of disbelief, the fourth wall we keep banging our bodies against when reading a book, is sufficient if spice may be had for the sacrifice of such.

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